App of the Month: Haiku Deck

by: Carli Spina - May 13th, 2013

Creating visually engaging presentations can be a difficult process. Haiku Deck is one app aimed at simplifying this process. Available for iOS devices, this app helps users to create visually interesting slides that focus on interesting images and a limited amount of text. The app offers five free themes and eleven additional paid themes, but all of the available themes make images and graphics the focal point of the slides. With Haiku Deck, users are encouraged to have images fill their entire slide with bands of text appearing on top of the images. And, to make this process as simple as possible, Haiku Deck offers an integrated image search feature that will help you to find the perfect Creative Commons licensed images for your presentation. If you opt to use images found this way, Haiku Deck will automatically include the appropriate attribution for the image in your presentation file. If you prefer to use your own images, Haiku Deck can directly connect to your device’s camera or stored photos or it can pull images from your Facebook, Instagram, Dropbox, Flickr, Picasa or Google Drive accounts. For those who will be referring to data in their presentations, the app also allows you to create simple bar and pie graphs to illustrate your point. Once you have completed your presentation, you can publish it as either a public, private or restricted file, which makes it easy to make sure that only your intended audience will see your slides. Published slide decks can be shared via URL, on social media or by embedding the slides in a blog or on a website. If you are an iPad or iPhone user, this is a great option for creating and delivering presentations right from your device.